School Reform Gets Cool!

Finally, there’s a conversation starting about school reform, more or less. Not that Hollywood “buzz” will ever lead to anything productive, but if we can get younger Americans talking about the value and place of education in our society, it really can’t hurt.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, the ultimate hipster actress, stars in “Won’t Back Down,” an education-reform drama that hits theaters next month. When did school choice became cool?

The film is the tale of two parents (one a teacher) who decide to save their own kids and many others by taking over a failing school in a poor Pittsburgh neighborhood.

This follows “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” the 2010 documentary that depicted the fortunes of those desperately competing for a place at a charter school — from the same progressive filmmaker who gave us “An Inconvenient Truth.”

In fact, a whole lot of 20- and 30-somethings across the political spectrum now believe something’s seriously flawed in our public-education system. (You can bet Gyllenhaal wouldn’t have taken the role otherwise.) But why the sea change?

Start by “blaming” Teach For America — which for decades now has placed recent graduates from top colleges as teachers in some of America’s worst public schools.

This year, TFA has 10,000 corps members working in 36 states and the District of Columbia. It has 28,000 “alumni,” more than two-thirds still in education-related fields. But even those who’ve left for other lines of work have had a glimpse of how bad our inner-city schools have become. The incompetence and corruption are hard to forget.

Oh, and they talk to their peers about it, too.

Other factors have helped move ideas like vouchers, charter schools and parent-trigger laws from obscure libertarian pet peeves to become the hot cause of the millennial generation.

In his new book “The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City,” Alan Ehrenhalt describes how more affluent Americans are staying in or moving to urban areas. With crime at all-time lows, cities look increasingly attractive to young couples starting families. But all the baby-friendly beer gardens and organic kids-clothing boutiques can’t make up for terrible schools.

In New Orleans for a few days this spring, I kept tripping over TFA alums and charter-school organizers. They’re marrying each other, having kids and staying in the city. The heroes of this burgeoning education-reform community are people like Michele Rhee and her husband (Sacramento Mayor and former NBA star) Kevin Johnson; their efforts are funded by upstart Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

The teachers unions, meanwhile, are looking like dinosaurs. Hip urbanites don’t need to read Cato Institute white papers to find out how bad unions have made things. They can tuck into stories like Steven Brill’s now-infamous New Yorker piece on the the city’s “rubber rooms” to see just how the unions are preventing kids from getting a decent education.

Or just look at how pathetic the unions’ arguments have gotten. Last week, American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten actually resorted to a sexist canard to “rebut” a Wall Street Journal oped.

Campbell Brown had written a Journal piece charging the union with protecting teachers accused of having sexual relationships with students — something it clearly does, as part of fighting any attempt to get rid of any teacher, no matter how bad or perverse.

Since there is no defense for such reprehensible actions, Weingarten complained on Twitter that Brown is biased because she’s married to Dan Senor, who serves on the board of StudentsFirst, a Michele Rhee-headed reform group. Really, Randi? Very uncool.

A survey released last week by the Fordham Foundation shows that public opinion is firmly against “Last In, First Out,” the signature union policy that rewards seniority over teaching ability.

By a 74 percent to 18 percent margin, respondents believe that teachers with poor performance should be “laid off first and those with excellent performance protected” rather than have “newcomers laid off first and veteran teachers protected.”